All or Nothing At All: A Life of Frank Sinatra

from Jazz Notes 1/1 1998

This a fascinating and flowing story, replete with details,
of how Frank Sinatra became as famous, successful, and powerful as he did.
Donald Clarke has at his command the knowledge of developments in society in
general and especially in the entertainment world and the recording
industry, and he explains how all these elements influenced Sinatra's
destiny, and how Sinatra influenced them. This book has much to recommend
it, and is an excellent place to start reading about Frank Sinatra. Its
greatest strength lies in the richness of its analysis of Sinatra's rise in
the 1940s, his fall in the early 1950s, and his second coming when he signed
with Capitol and won an Oscar for his portrayal of the doomed Maggio in
From Here to Eternity, filmed in 1953. Clarke has an uncanny
ability to describe Sinatra's singing style and chronicle his musical
maturation. Normally that type of material is rendered in a dry way. But
not here.

Early in the book, Clarke examines how Sinatra took a tiny,
or anyway, completely untutored gift but a big love for singing and turned
it into a career. As soon as Sinatra's recording career goes into gear with
Harry James's band, Clarke launches his analysis of Sinatra's style and the
material he sang. Clarke maintains that intense scrutiny without ever
letting the book turn into a glorified discography. It always remains a
narrative, and the ins and outs of Sinatra's performances are skillfully
woven into the story of his personal and professional ups and downs.

For example, Clarke describes precisely how Sinatra
discovered the secret of Tommy Dorsey's phrasing. The trombonist kept a
little air hole open at the side of his mouth to replenish his breath
between phrases so he could play long, fluid lines. Dorsey was the most
important influence on Sinatra's breathing and phrasing, Sinatra has often
said. And Sinatra had the perspicacity to know what to study, whom to
emulate, and how to work very hard.

Sinatra also knew when to take professional risks. His
timing was perfect not only when he sang, but when he decided to strike out
for himself as a solo singer, leaving Dorsey's band behind, devil take the
hindmost - and Dorsey almost did, imposing usurious terms when he let
Sinatra out of his contract. If these stories aren't exactly new, they are
pleasant to read again within the context of the whole Sinatra story.

The book really sails along when Clarke explains Sinatra's
position in the music world. Clarke writes about something "important and
interesting . . . happening to the record business, something
neither Mitch Miller nor Capitol Records nor Frank Sinatra could have
anticipated. In 1947, when the long-playing record was introduced,
Sinatra's biggest fans, the generation of the returning soldiers and their
brides, were short of cash; some were going to college on the GI bill and
the rest were starting families. But by 1954, they were becoming more
prosperous. Some of them still had their Frank Sinatra 78s, but now they
were buying albums, not singles. They were buying Frank Sinatra albums."

Between 1954 and 1957, Sinatra made his first seven albums
for Capitol, arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle, and all reached the
top ten of the Billboard album chart. "Only one of them didn't reach
the top five. . . . Long playing records always made more
money than singles, and at a time when more albums were being sold than ever
before, Sinatra was easily beating the competition. . . .
Talk about a comeback. .&nbsp:. . Sinatra was reckoned to be the
biggest-selling album artist of all by a wide margin during 1955-59. And
for the entire decade of the 1960s he was beaten only by the Beatles."

Clarke theorizes that people bought albums thoughtfully,
wanting them to endure, and replaced them when they wore out. "And it is
not too much to say that Sinatra's enduring reputation as the greatest pop
singer of the century could rest on these 1954-57 albums with Nelson
Riddle."

Clarke has a knack for taking the reader through recording
sessions and other public events in Sinatra's career and adding color and
human interest. Here is an excerpt from the book that illustrates the point
- a quote from John Garvey, a fiddler in a dance band with which Sinatra
was about to sing in 1943: "The musicians were skeptical until one day, at
rehearsal, Sinatra and the orchestra were handed a new song. Sinatra just
stood there with the lead sheet in one hand, the other hand cupping his ear,
following along silently while the orchestra read through the (Axel)
Stordahl chart. A second time through he sang it in half voice. The third
time through he took over. We all knew then that we had an extraordinary
intuitive musician on our hands."

Clarke has a wonderful background in the pop music world,
and it seems as if all his experience has been put to the service of this
book. It isn't always the most elegantly written book I've ever read, but
it is always readable and filled with information about the intricacies and
interlocking relationships in the jazz and pop music worlds. Anyone who
isn't already familiar with much of the history of the music world will
undoubtedly welcome Clarke's wealth of information. He certainly added to
the considerable amount I already knew. For example, his report on the
tumultuous relationship between Buddy Rich and Sinatra in Tommy Dorsey's
band held me in thrall. About the tensions and competition between Sinatra
and Buddy Rich, Clarke offers: "Rich and Sinatra recognized and respected
each other's talent; it was just that they were both spoiled brats and
borderline hoodlums."

Later on, Sinatra gave Rich money to start his own band -
and nearly provoked a fight with another man unsuccessfully importuning
Sinatra for money at the same moment. Sinatra loved to help people whom he
liked and hated to be in the position of needing help, Clarke reports.

It is only when he writes so authoritatively about
Sinatra's personal life that I wonder where Clarke's authority comes from.
There's no bibliography in the book and no list of people interviewed,
though many quotes and ideas are attributed within the narrative. I, like
so many other people, have read plenty about Sinatra's headline-grabbing
exploits. I assume most people have heard the fable that the Mafia secured
Sinatra his chance to play the role of Maggio. In Clarke's history, the
Mafia had nothing to do with it. Sinatra admired gangsters and felt
comfortable with them. But that sympathy was a matter apart from his
career. Sinatra and other people within the entertainment industry,
including his second wife, Ava Gardner, lobbied until he got the chance to
audition for the role. Though he was bested by actor Eli Wallach's
audition, Sinatra got the part anyway, because Wallach had a conflicting
engagement. That's Clarke's version of the story, and Clarke never mentions
the legend of the Mafia backing Sinatra's bid for a new lease on his career.
That omission strikes me as very strange. Clarke certainly exploded a
big-time myth - it has become part of the country's folklore - and might
have explained how he came to do that.

He also surprised me when he said Sinatra gave up the
chance to sing "Mona Lisa," and it passed to Nat King Cole in 1950. Sinatra
wasn't signed to Capitol at that time. The brother of Capitol executive
Alan Livingston was a co-composer of the song. And I had been under the
impression, and I still am, that Capitol artist Nat Cole was first choice
for singing that song. Also, while researching my book about Nat Cole, I
was told by several people that he had advised Capitol to sign Frank to a
contract at a time when Sinatra's career was in the doldrums. Capitol
didn't sign Sinatra without thinking the situation over carefully. Clarke
suggests that Capitol jumped at the chance to sign Sinatra. Also at
Capitol, Cole passed up a chance to record "Young At Heart" and told the
company to give it to Sinatra. Cole had already had a big success with "Too
Young" and didn't want to do such a similar song. Clarke simply says
someone passed the song to Sinatra.

These Cole-related stories may not be the most riveting
details you ever heard, but they make me wonder a little about whether
Clarke's book is 100 percent correct. It is definitely filled with
interesting minutiae carried along in a strong, flowing narrative about one
man's career within the context of the American pop music world. Above all,
this book is a great history lesson, but maybe there are discrepancies here
and there, and this book, as good as it is, just might not be the Bible
about Sinatra.

To his credit, Clarke doesn't exploit the tales of
Sinatra's sex life, love life, temper, and scandalously rude and even
occasionally violent behavior (though I would have liked more scenes -
that's my taste). Sinatra's flaws are neither hidden nor overplayed. So
this is a high-minded book about one of our less high-minded superstars - a
man that could easily be considered a low brow except when it came to music.
(And of course that's a monumental proviso.)

I simply can't comment more about the absolute veracity of
this book, but it has fascinating theories and reports about his family and
personal relationships that are kept subsidiary to the story of his career.
And until Sinatra himself tells his story from his point of view - and
maybe not even then, since people don't always tell or even know the truth
about themselves - he will remain at least a bit of a mystery.

Overall, Clarke's report is engrossing, beginning with his
perspective on the Italian immigration and the particular social,
economic, and moral orientation of Sinatra's family. If Sinatra wasn't
exactly a mama's boy - he alone decided to become a singer, against
his mother's advice - he nevertheless benefited enormously, at least
at first, from his mother's attempts to help him, or control him, or
make him dependent upon her. Without her ability to pull strings to
open the first doors, he could never have gotten through them on his
own. She was his first powerful mentor. A politician, saloon keeper,
midwife, abortionist, and "small time gangster," as Clarke described
her, to some degree she was an embarrassment to her son, though he
didn't admit it. She was arrested for her activities as an
abortionist.

As an only child he had the ability to get her to spoil
him. And he paid strict attention to her forceful personality, worried
about her opinions, and respected her all his life. She scared him to
death, he eventually admitted. She engineered his employment as a singing
waiter at the Rustic Garden in New Jersey, whence he was spirited away by
Harry James. Then Sinatra's rise to stardom begins in earnest.

There's a great deal in this book that I never heard before
about Sinatra's complex personality, and now that I know, I'm more
interested, or tantalized, by him. Apropos his music, I always liked many
of his interpretations of songs, and now I understand more about his
musicianship - his phrasing, his bravura, his approach, even his tonality,
and much more.

There's no discography, but Clarke pays such great
attention to Sinatra's songs, one by one, as they came along in his career,
that a discography isn't really necessary here. That remains as another
study to be done. The most important quality any biography can have is
veracity, I believe, and perhaps this book is the most plausible one so far.
I can't comment about the reports on the innermost workings of Sinatra's
soul, but the book is always engaging - except when it deals with Sinatra's
personal life from the 1970s on. Then the book becomes mostly theoretical,
with few intimate views of Sinatra or his fourth wife, Barbara Marx, and
does not even have pictures of third wife Mia Farrow or Barbara. It's as if
the best sources for that sort of material have pulled back into their
shells.